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| Greg's diary |
| November 2018 |
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| Thursday, 1 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 1 November 2018 |
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ARPAnet and the dangers of daylight saving time
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
I've recently become aware of a number of people who strongly object to daylight saving time. OK, I'm not a great fan, but there are many other things I'd rather grumble about.
But then, a couple of days ago was the 49th anniversary of the day I wrote my first program. For some reason, people found it more interesting that it was also the day that the first two datagrams were transmitted across the ARPANET.
Or was it? The documentation states that it happened on 29 October 1969, at 22:30. What time zone? US Pacific Time. DST or no DST? Nowadays it would be DST, since the transition is the first Sunday in November. But was it like that at the time? Spent quite a bit of time reading /usr/src/contrib/tzdata/northarmerica and watching my eyes go funny, and came to the conclusion: yes, standard time. In 1969 (and, it seems, until as recently as 2006), DST ended on the last Sunday in October:
And the last Sunday in October 1969 was 26 October 1969. Some discussion on the TUHS mailing list, where people repeated their dislike of DST. But this message still contained an interesting example of the dangers of getting your DST wrong
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Focus stacked macros: the pain
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Off down the road again today to take some more photos of the Thelymitra pauciflora. It wasn't easy: it was windier than I had expected, my footstool proved to be so low that it was almost no help:,
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The barely visible pair of Thelymitra in the middle of the second image show the problem. In addition, I ran into significant technical problems: I really, really want to be able to tell the camera to take a series of images over a focus range, not just a fixed number, which might be too many or too few. And to help that, I need much better support from the camera. “Focus peaking” is an excellent idea, but for some reason it pretty much doesn't work at all when you're close to 1:1 magnification. And then there's this stupid bug in the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II firmware: when the external viewfinder is connected, the camera switches off focus stacking, so I continually had to disconnect it before taking the photos.
Back home with 240 odd photos (about 5 GB), but wasn't able to get any useful results before evening.
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CJ's computer problems, next installment
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Topic: technology | Link here |
CJ Ellis along towards evening. He hadn't called or sent email: his entire electronic infrastructure was offline, he said. Aussie Broadband had cancelled his service because he had accidentally replied to a spam message, so his VoIP service didn't work any more either. And his computer continually displayed pornographic images that he couldn't get rid of.
OK, first things first. Contacted Aussie Broadband. No, the service was still intact. OK, fire up the machine. Indeed, as soon as I started chrome, up popped multiple very pornographic images like a Hydra: as soon as you closed on, another popped up in its place. Installed firefox and confirmed that this was some configuration of his chrome. Some time, when I have the time, I suppose I should reinstall that for him. Probably it would make more sense to reinstall the whole system from an image I took a while back.
The other issue: his machine runs Microsoft “Windows” 7. It has 2 GB of memory:
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And that is clearly too little. The poor little thing is swapping its heart out. Now where did I have a spare DIMM? What kind is it, anyway? Do I really have to count the contacts?
| Friday, 2 November 2018 | Dereel | |
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Downloading film list: correction
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A couple of days ago I discovered that I couldn't download MediathekView's file list using the internal download function: it timed out repeatedly. But using fetch worked fine, so I decided to do that instead.
But things aren't that simple. Today fetch timed out repeatedly for over an hour. So I tried it with the internal downloader. It worked immediately! So whatever the issue is, it's not as simple as bugs in the internal downloader.
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More Thelymitras
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Spent quite some time trying to process yesterday's Thelymitra flowers, with very limited success:
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That's all I got out of a total of 240 images: only four in total (the other two look very similar), and even those don't bear much looking at.
What went wrong? Mainly the wind, but also getting things in focus. Even the close-up isn't as good as it should be: the tip of the petal at the bottom isn't completely in focus, nor is the back of the flower. In this case, clearly I needed not only a better start focus point, but also more steps. There should really be more help from the camera. And why doesn't focus peaking work at these distances?
On the positive side, I found some more, much more accessible flowers in front of our own property. But it was far too windy—we had winds of up to 33 km/h and gusts of up to 48 km/h. Tomorrow? Then it will be cooler, so the flowers will probably shrivel up and die.
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Installing the new cooktops
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Topic: general | Link here |
Now that we have the new gas and induction cooktops, it's time to install them. I had been recommended Mike Simpson (“Mike for odd jobs”, phone 0419 935 147), who proves to do mainly joinery, and definitely no plumbing, electrical or painting work. He charges round $80 just to come out here, but today he was prepared to do it for free—just to take a look, and definitely not to install the cooktops.
He showed up and spent some time investigating. The good news: it's straightforward. The less good news: he can't do it for at least 2 weeks. I was also left wondering whether it would even work the way we planned it, with a single hole for both cooktops. The Bosch cooktop has clips on either side to hold it in place. How can that work if there's nothing to clip to on the one side?
| Saturday, 3 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 3 November 2018 |
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Wildflowers and orchids
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The weather has changed completely in the last couple of days. On Thursday the temperature reached 32.8° and didn't drop below 20° after 8:00. Today the temperatures ranged from 9° to 18°. And not surprisingly, the Thelymitra pauciflora were no longer flowering. While searching for them, though, I found at least a dozen plants at the north-east corner of our plot of land. Have they all finished flowering? I'll keep my eyes open.
Further south, there are plenty of wildflowers, but how do you catch them in a photo?
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It's not until you enlarge it greatly (this is a 52 MP image) that you see what you would see with the naked eye:
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The white flowers are Burchardia umbellata (or “Milkmaids”), and the violet flowers are, I think, Thysanotus patersonii, also called Twining Fringe Lily. The problem is that there is no fringe. Could it be something else?
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Air fried hash browns
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Rather against my will, Yvonne wanted to serve hash browns with the pepper steaks this evening. How should we prepare them? Another task for the digital air fryer. But how do I arrange them? Put them flat and they'll only get done on one side. But that wasn't an option: the basket was too small. In the end, tried them in different orientations, and all worked. Here before, after, and in the serving dish (Yvonne had tastefully turned the pale side downwards):
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The sadness of this world
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Nikolai, in a typical pose:
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| Sunday, 4 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 4 November 2018 |
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Sir Christiane rides again
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Topic: photography, animals, opinion | Link here |
Chris Bahlo has been coming here to go riding for a simple reason: she needs somebody to help her to put on her armour. For me, it was a chance to try out new autofocus settings. Kev Russell on the M43 Tech Talk Facebook group had made a post suggesting the use of “small” focus points on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, so I tried that.
This time things were interesting for reasons not related to photography. Chris had mechanical issues with her armour, and Yvonne needed to fix them (https://youtu.be/oWOyaWG1ZqE and https://youtu.be/jM7LN0D6WKo):
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She returned again later for more adjustments. The cord is electric fence wiring, though we considered that cable ties probably would have done better:
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Finally she was off, and I had the opportunity to compare my focus tracking:
Nope, I'm still losing focus, though I kept the focus point on the horse throughout the clip. In addition, the exposure compensation is jerky. I haven't seen that before. Could that be due to the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150 mm f/4.0-5.6 that I used on this occasion?
Also took another failed focus attempt.
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Fringe lily? Chocolate lily?
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
While writing up yesterday's article on the wildflowers, I found a discrepancy between what I considered a Thysanotus patersonii (twining fringe lily) and what I had. On Google image search I found a photo that exactly matched my flowers:
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Unfortunately, it proved that I had taken it myself, even in exactly the same place. And closer examination shows that the “fringe lily” is called that because of the fringes on the petals, which are missing here.
Further investigation suggested that it might instead be a Dichopogon strictus, for some reason called a “chocolate lily”:
OK, time for some focus stacked images, this time in a more controlled environment than last time. Much work, and once again failure! Firstly, I didn't get enough shots (WHY can't Olympus supply better aids to decide on start and end focus?):
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Apart from that, of course, the photo was taken from the wrong angle, which only occurred to after it was all finished. I really need to spend a lot more time setting up these images.
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Buy Britannica!
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
A while back I signed up with Encyclopædia Britannica in the hope of getting some interesting suggestions. Instead I got marginally disguised spam. But today's message was the limit:
Interestingly, the content didn't refer to Benjamin Franklin at all. But how should I parse it? Who considered Ben Franklin to be deranged? Good-bye, Britannica.
| Monday, 5 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 5 November 2018 |
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Extracting frames from videos
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Topic: multimedia, photography, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's video clips contained some interesting individual frames. They were 1080p, so the resultant images would be quite acceptable. But how do I extract them? It's not the first time: I did exactly the same thing two months ago. But how? I forgot to write it down.
While pondering the issue, I received one of these horrible spams from Ashampoo: video optimizer, for a special low price. I've had lots of issues with Ashampoo recently, and I'm seriously considering changing to some other software—if I can find something that's not equally painful. Still, it might be what I'm looking for, at least for today, so I downloaded it.
And once again I ran into a hang entering data. I was offered an extension of the 10 day free trial to 30 days—just enter my customer email address. But once again it hung, and I had to shoot it down. But it didn't want to know: when I tried to restart it, it claimed to be already running, no matter what the Task Manager might say:
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What's the problem here? I've established that their support department, though well-meaning, doesn't know how to escalate things, but my guess is that this is related to the fact that I access my Microsoft box via remote desktop, and there's some bug that the developers aren't finding out about. But life's too short for that kind of thing, so today I just took screen shots of the frames I wanted. I probably should spend some time investigating video processing software.
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DxO PhotoLab 2
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
For a couple of months now I've been investigating various ways to remove the artefacts from this image:
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On 11 September I tried Inpaint, and on 25 October I tried movavi Photo Editor. Both sort of worked, but they were fiddly: they don't offer any help to recognizing areas that I want to mark.
And now DxO has brought out another release of PhotoLab. What are the features? What are the differences? Is it worth paying $70 for the upgrade? In principle I've been relatively happy with DxO, but documentation is not their forte. Spent some time looking at their videos, which are more geared towards advertising, and it seems that it can do the same things as Inpaint and movavi. Tried it out and discovered one serious issue: one of the functions is assigned to Alt-left button. But that's already used by my window manager. Not DxO's problem, of course, but it's a concern: the first time in over 20 years that I've run into this kind of conflict.
Still, I was able to mark things. How do I then delete them? I still don't know. It's certainly not “intuitive”, and once again I couldn't find the manual. Why don't they have videos showing the details and not just the result? This is exactly the situation where it would be a good idea.
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Tomatoes: time to go
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Six weeks ago I planted some tomato seedlings into pots to wait for Melbourne Cup Day:
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Cup Day is tomorrow, and the twelve seedlings have not been idle:
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Time to plant some and give the rest away. Yvonne and Chris Bahlo are off to Garvoc tomorrow to pick up a horse from Nele Kömle, so we'll send four plants for Nele. Chris only wants one, but it looks like we can get rid of two more with Pene Kirk.
| Tuesday, 6 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 6 November 2018 |
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Another bloody power failure!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
This morning was a day to trim my beard. Grabbed the trimmer, idly wondering whether it was worth fixing the old one that had suddenly just decided not to run any more. Clearly a wiring issue, but why bother fixing them when they're so cheap...
Plugged in the trimmer. Nothing. Exactly the same symptoms. Power failure? No, other things were running, including the water pump. But on checking, discovered eventually that the circuit breaker for one circuit had tripped. Damn! Why did that happen?
And, of course, it was the one circuit to which eureka was connected. I didn't have it on the main UPS circuits because that UPS keeps fluctuating (switching on and off based on the power input?), and that causes the second-in-line UPS to beep, so I had moved it to the other circuit. If it had been on the primary UPS circuit, nothing would have happened.
Fortunately, this time the fsck went smoothly, and an hour later I was back online. But I'm left wondering: my decision to use standard UFS (without journaling) was based on the assumption that I would almost never have a crash. And that's just not the case.
So what do I do? Everybody tells me to migrate to ZFS. But that scares me, and it seems to require ridiculous compute resources. Maybe a NAS box? Clearly things can't go on like this.
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Ashampoo examined more carefully
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's fun with Ashampoo video optimizer had me wondering. In the past I had noticed stuff like that, where characters echo at about one every 30 seconds. So today I tried again. And sure enough, to get my extended trial period took me 27 minutes before my cut and paste had echoed and I was allowed to click on the Next button. And after that, another 4 minutes before the application actually started.
Then it seemed to react normally. But can I be bothered? Not today. Peter Jeremy pointed me to FFmpeg, which can extract stills from videos. That's the second recommendation. I should take a look.
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More tomatoes
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Yvonne off to see Nele Kömle today, as planted, taking five tomato plants with her, four for Nele and one for Chris Bahlo. Now I only had six left over, two for Pene Kirk. One was already planted, and I planted two more.
Here's the one that I planted a week ago, and now:
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It's not clear how much the plant has changed; I'd guess that it has grown. But what's very clear are other plants around it. I counted no less than 17 volunteer descendents of last year's plant. What do I do with them?
Here the new ones:
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Also planted one of the snow pea plants that Petra Gietz gave us, but they still look very fragile:
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| Wednesday, 7 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 7 November 2018 |
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The demise of the Micro Four Thirds system?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
A couple of months ago Tony and Chelsea Northrup produced a discussion of MIRRORLESS WARS, in which they predicted the demise of the Micro Four Thirds system. That wasn't enough: they have now produced a second one titled “Micro Four-Thirds is DEAD”.
Is he right? First I need to hear what he has to say, so I watched the entire clip. There's some interesting stuff, but not enough for a blow-by-blow discussion. In many respects I can't agree with his arguments.
One of the big ones is “A manufacturer will not tell you when he's going to stop production of a product”, and he points to Panasonic's introduction of the new Lumix S series, still under development. Why would they jump into that market if they weren't thinking of stopping production of the Micro Four Thirds system?
Well, their CEO made that clear: there's an opportunity. He expects that Micro Four Thirds will continue to be the mainstay of their camera production. And the fact that they're bringing out a 10-25 mm f/1.7 zoom lens—the world's fastest zoom—lends weight to that claim.
Then Tony goes on to state that the reason for smaller sensors in the first place was just because the sensors themselves were so expensive to make that they were a significant part of the camera price, and now that has changed. Is he right? He could be, but I didn't know that. When I chose the Four Thirds system in 2007, that was not a factor. Innovation was.
But Tony says that small sensors produce bad results. He also says that mobile phone cameras produce surprisingly good results. Which is it to be? Four Thirds has a quarter of the area of a full frame sensor. The current best mobile phone camera on DxOMark's site is the Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 with a 1/2.55 sensor, about 8.7% of the size of a Four Thirds sensor.
The other thing that Tony doesn't appear to understand is that sensor performance is dependent on pixel size, not sensor dimensions. The Four Thirds sensor has an area of 224.9 mm², so a 20 MP sensor will have pixels of 11.2 μm². A full frame sensor has an area of (frequently marginally less than) 864 mm², so a 45.7 MP sensor like on the Nikon Z7 would have a pixel size of 18.9 μm². Not as big a difference as it might seem. On the other hand, the Xiaomi pixels, despite the relatively low resolution of 12 MP, has pixels about 1.62 μm² in size.
And then he gets on to lens sizes. Micro Four Thirds lenses are no smaller than full frame lenses, he says. To prove his point, he drags out an Olympus 300 mm f/4 and a Nikon 600 mm f/4. This image from the 43rumours discussion:
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Huh? What has he been smoking? Oh, no, you can't compare an f/4 full frame lens with a Micro Four Thirds f/4 lens. There's this thing about equivalent aperture. You need to compare it with an f/8 lens.
Sorry, Tony, but this is stupid. I'll write a separate rant on the subject, but basically there are two ways to measure aperture: by the amount of light it lets in (the standard method) or by the relative depth of field. And for reasons I really don't understand, some people use the depth-of-field criterion. In this case, it seems that Tony is saying that depth of field (or rather, lack of it) is more important than exposure.
Sure, shallow depth of field can be useful in composition, but for me it's been the bane of my life. I see the increased depth of field of Micro Four Thirds cameras as an advantage. It certainly is in the case of long telephoto photography. But never mind, that goes against Tony's argument. He says that to compare the cameras, you need to compare full frame lenses with Micro Four Thirds lenses with half the aperture (for example, 50 mm f/2.8 FF with 25 mm f/1.4 Micro Four Thirds). And there's the problem: there are effectively no 50 mm f/2.8 full frame lenses.
I did a bit of comparison and came up with a Canon EOS R with a Canon TSE 135 mm f/4 and an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II) with an M.Zuiko Digital ED 75 mm f/1.8, which, according to Tony, would correspond to a full frame 150 mm f/3.4, both larger “equivalent aperture” and equivalent focal length, so it should be bigger than the Canon lens (here), and then the Sigma 50 mm f/2.8 EX DG with the Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4 (here):
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Yup, when Tony's right, he's right. This time he's wrong even according to his own strange standards.
The next point that Tony makes is a good one: research and development for new equipment is expensive, and to be amortized it needs large sales figures. So now that Panasonic has gone the full frame way, it's clear that they'll give up on Micro Four Thirds within 12 months. Never mind what the CEOs say about relative market, never mind the fact that they've spread their costs by going along with Leica and Sigma.
And Olympus is going down a “lonely path” with Micro Four Thirds. They're too expensive. The Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II costs (US) $2000, but it can't keep up with the Sony A7 III, which costs the same.
OK, we can check what other people think about that. Here is a good comparison. Summarizing (my choice):
| Camera | E-M1 Mark II | A7 III | ||
| Price (B&H) | $1,599 | $1,998 | ||
| Better lens selection | • | |||
| Still frame rate | 60.6 f/s | 9.9 f/s | ||
So it's not really clear that the A7 III is the Olympus killer, and his price claims don't hold out.
But no, Micro Four Thirds will be dead within 5 years. That's why Olympus has not started on any alternative route, of course. And if small sensors are no longer worthwhile, what's Fujifilm doing?
Of course there have been other people who disagree. This rebuttal by Joseph Ellis goes into some detail about his claims.
First, the dangers of mobile phones: that battle is over. Mobile phones won. Micro Four Thirds is still here.
Then, Tony is far too fixated on sensors. The mobile phone battle shows that pretty much any sensor is good enough, and the difference in quality between individual sensors is no longer what it was.
Instead there are other factors, like weather sealing (in that connection, it's interesting to note that the EOS R is barely weather sealed, despite its considerably higher price) and multishot functionality like Pro Capture Mode. He didn't mention it, but things like focus stacking and HDR mode also come to mind.
Other aspects that he mentioned are what I have experienced, that users of long telephoto lenses are migrating to smaller cameras because they're easier to use, and that Olympus, in particular, is very innovative, while the big brands are quite conservative. That rings true: that's one of the main reasons I got started with Olympus in the first place.
Regarding “equivalent aperture”, he notes that there's a real epidemic of bokeh (a word that I hadn't heard of before the beginning of this century, and which the OED still doesn't know), and that it's “the enemy of good composition”. But without bokeh (which the US Americans seem to pronounce in two different ways), Tony's main size argument falls even flatter.
OED added the word “bokeh” in December 2019. First attestation was in 1997.
And maybe he sums the whole issue up with the statement that the Northrups need to produce something to please their (far too prominent) sponsors: “They've got to create articles that make some buzz and stir things up”
That's probably the best summary of the whole thing. It's a pity, though, since it won't help sales of Micro Four Third cameras.
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Wonders of Jalapa
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Other plants that are coming up in the garden include some Mirabilis jalapa, which stowed away in a pot plant:
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They're not the only ones. Around one of the pots I found this:
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That's many small plants. I think I'll leave them there until they finish flowering, and then dig out the bulbs.
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Cockatoos!
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Topic: animals | Link here |
There are plenty of Sulphur-crested cockatoos in Victoria, but they normally don't come very close. But a couple of days ago, one flew past me so close that I thought he would hit me. And today, while walking the dogs, I saw this:
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That was just at the entrance to the driveway, and the bird was one of two or three, only about 6 m away. They seemed to be interested in the bark of the tree, or maybe some secretion. I wonder if we'll see more of them.
| Thursday, 8 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 8 November 2018 |
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Welcome Ruth
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Topic: general | Link here |
Ruth Viebrock arrived today almost as planned. We had spent some time looking at flightradar24, which disagreed with the flight schedule. Of course the (British Airways) schedule was wrong: BA7410, leaving HKG at 18:05 yesterday and arriving at MEL this morning at 6:35. Problem: it was code shared with Qantas QF30, leaving HKG at 19:00 and arriving at 7:30. How do people make such a mess?
In fact, she took off at 19:29 arrived at 7:07, though British Airways reported completely different times, but too late to catch the 7:45 shuttle to Ballarat, so Yvonne went off to meet the next bus at 10:35. Not there: there had been a pileup on the freeway, they had to take a deviation, and the staff member at the station had no idea when they would arrive (or of much else, it appears). But she ended up arriving only about 10 minutes late.
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Australian animals for Ruth
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Ruth is overjoyed to be in a place that she previously only knew from photos. And being an animal lover, of course she wanted to see Australian animals. The first one we encountered was while walking the dogs:
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A black snake (Pseudechis)! I don't know when I last saw one. It must be well over 10 years ago. But they're very poisonous, and we gave it a wide berth.
Later on Ruth saw some kangaroos at a distance in our paddocks, so she has the definite feeling of being in Australia.
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Tony Northrup again
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
To my surprise, people on IRC were relatively interested in yesterday's article on the Micro Four Thirds system. I knew that Jashank Jeremy has one, and by extension Peter Jeremy supports the system. And it seems that Daniel O'Connor also bought one for his daughter (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM5), and has also invested in a couple of lenses. So clearly they're interested, but it's also an indication that the system is popular. I may have influenced Jashank with his purchase, but Daniel didn't even buy the same brand.
Some discussion on IRC, in which (for once) everybody agreed with me, and one overriding concept came out of the discussion: Tony Northrup is fixated on sensor size, to a point where his other arguments don't make sense. R&D costs? The best way to reduce them is for makers to cooperate, and that's exactly what Micro Four Thirds does. Nearly all new full-frame mirrorless cameras (Nikon, Canon) continue the old line of one maker, one system.
I need to think about this more and update my article.
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Activating a SIM card for Ruth
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
One of the first things we wanted to do for Ruth was to activate a SIM card for her telephone. OK, finally a use for the free Vodafone SIM that I got with my new phone.
The first thing you need to do is to activate it, of course. The recommended way is “Insert the SIM into your device, switch it on and follow the prompts”. OK, insert, switch on. Nothing exciting happens.
Is that because there's no coverage? Or does it expect to be put into a Nokia 3? I could try activation online, but that way madness lies. Instead I took the ALDI SIM that I had bought for this eventuality and put it into the phone. All OK, please activate. This time I tried the online method and was asked to provide a credit card number so that they could deduct a random sum to be used as a password, then to be refunded.
Been there, done that. It takes for ever. So I tried the phone approach instead (2534, free call, works even when not activated). Connected to <mumble>. How do you spell that? <mumble><mumble><mumble>. Lee? No, finally it turned out to be Fay. I don't have any issue with outsourcing phone support services to countries where English is not the main language, but I wish they'd choose people whom I could understand.
The first thing that she wanted was a “Security PIN”. I've never heard of one of those before on this service; maybe it's because I avoid phone contact. She wasn't very helpful, and finally I gave up and decided to bite the bullet and deduct the sum from my credit card.
But that didn't work. Something went wrong (!), as they said.
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What? They're too polite to say. Tried again. Same thing. Different browser. Another different browser. Another system. Always the same thing.
Dammit, call them up again, and this time <mumble>'s name proved to be Marly. Some script again. I asked to be connected to a supervisor, but no, she could help me. I had to ask three times and threaten to complain to the TIO before I was finally connected to Martin, who was in fact quite helpful. The reason for this business in the first place was a discrepancy between my name on the driver license (GREGORY P LEHEY) and on my account (Greg Lehey). And the deduction didn't work because the last <mumble> had cancelled the order. And yes, I need to do the deduction, but he can do that for me. That involved resetting my password, but that's not an issue.
Only the deduction didn't show up on my account. That's not surprising, but it means waiting until tomorrow before I can continue.
| Friday, 9 November 2018 | Dereel → Cape Clear → Berringa → fDereel | Images for 9 November 2018 |
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Spring planting
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Mick the gardener along today, this time with the task of planting many plants in the garden—in fact, so many that I wasn't sure where to put them all. We put the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis in the bed on the north side of the house. Both required to be propped up:
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The second one also looks rather unhappy:
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Mike didn't water any of the plants, so I did it later; hopefully it will recover.
Then there were the couple of creepers that I had grown from cuttings. Unfortunately I don't know what each is, so we'll have to wait for them to flower:
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The first one is barely visible at the right side of the arch.
In front of the second creeper we did a second attempt at a row of Cannas, since the first ones (surprisingly) didn't do very well:
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Then a Pelargonium that Yvonne had found somewhere:
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It, too, is looking surprisingly unhappy, but I'm sure that it will recover.
And finally some more tomatoes, not quite in the order in which I had wanted them:
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Nikolai to the vets again
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Topic: animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Nikolai has been biting himself on the behind for a while, for no obvious reason. Today off to see Pene Kirk, in the process introducing her to Ruth and getting rid of the last of our tomato plants.
We couldn't find much wrong with Niko, so Pene shaved the area and put on some cortisone ointment, which will hopefully do the trick:
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Took a different way back, despite Yvonne's objections, to show Ruth a little more of the countryside. In Berringa I couldn't find my way home:
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For once I didn't have my GPS navigator with me, and I wasn't really sure where we were. Followed the sign to Dereel and ended up in a little track far too reminiscent of Westons Road in Dereel on 4 July 2014, where we ended up like this:
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Managed to turn around, and then I asked my phone, which really helped, though it's still fiddlier than with a real navigator. It seems that somebody had rotated the signpost.
Past Mount Misery Creek Bridge again, which, I was going to say, has further declined (like I did the last couple of times), but in fact there's not much difference. Here this time last year and then today:
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Then looking for spider orchids (a term that I haven't been able to uniquely identify, probably a Caladenia atrovespa or Caladenia attingens) where I had found them two years ago.
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We found almost nothing. I had assumed that it was because it was earlier in the year last time I was there, but in fact it was on 12 November. The difference must be the dryness this year.
About the only things I did find were these:
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What are they? No idea.
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ALDImobile activation, day 2
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
First thing in the morning I checked my bank account for the promised deduction from ALDImobile. Nothing. There was other activity, but not from ALDImobile.
Dammit, what now? Nothing for it, I had to brave their phone help service. This time <mumble>'s name proved to be Ann. Why is it so difficult to understand these names? I have never been able to understand them when they announce themselves, and I almost invariably need them to spell it for me.
She, too, went through her script and wanted me to do the same thing I had tried twice before. Once again I got fed up and asked for a supervisor, and once again she insisted that she could help.
Finally she put me through. This time <mumble> proved to be called Ethel,
and how about that, she was able to perform the activation there and then! Another change
of password, of course, which, compared to the previous one, suggests that their generated
passwords consist of 4 random digits, initials of customer in capitals, two lower case
letters and a ?. For me, the two lower case letters were am in each case, for
something like 0815GLam?.
Finally through. The moral of the story?
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New Melaleuca
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Walking the dogs today I saw an interesting plant:
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What is it? From the kind of flower, it has to be a Melaleuca or a Callistemon. I was just surprised to find it there, where we've been past hundreds of times before.
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Overflowing ice
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Freezing chicken stock in small pieces is the only way to go. It's easy to portion and easy to thaw out. Today I froze 5 pieces of about 200 g each. But this one was interesting:
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How did that happen? The left hand side was facing the door of the freezer, where it's clearly not quite as cold. So as the liquid on the right froze, it pushed its way out of the left hand side and over the edge.
| Saturday, 10 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 10 November 2018 |
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Camera crash!
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Topic: photography, general | Link here |
While taking my house photos this morning, something terrible happened: while I was carrying the tripod over my shoulder, with the camera overhead, the panorama bracket parted company with the tripod, and the whole assembly, including camera, lens and remote control, fell to the ground, taking a couple of photos on the way:
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$3000 worth of photographic equipment! How much damage?
The obvious things were that the remote control lost its battery cover and batteries (seen on the photos above), and the rail lost an adjusting screw. Nothing obvious at all on the camera or lens!
Further examination showed that the adjusting screw is held in place with a clip, and the rail and remote control weren't damaged. And the camera? After careful examination, all I could find was this:
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The rubber cup round the viewfinder had been pulled to one side on the left, showing the clip underneath. After replacing it, it was a little crumpled:
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And that was all! Even that went away after a while. How lucky can you be? Took many more photos, and clearly there's nothing wrong inside the camera. But I'll certainly check the tripod mount three times in future.
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More Hugin strangenesses
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Processing my house photos has got a lot easier since I created my batch scripts. Now I do a make pto and just have to do minor adjustments before the scripts continue. But from time to time I get really strange results. Here the house from the entrance:
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Why is it upside-down? Tried various things, but somehow they didn't work. In the end I edited the project file with Emacs, changing the orientation of the individual images. Here one of them:
That gave me this:
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They're the right way up, but the positions are wrong. But running another alignment fixed that:
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But why does this even happen?
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The three riders
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
A visitation from three riders this afternoon:
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Why three? It seems that in this case, at any rate, there are four of all good things.
The background: Margaret Swan has lent Keldan (on the right) to Ruth for the duration of her stay here, and they had brought them over from Chris Bahlo's place.
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Dinner for seven
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Chris Bahlo along for dinner today as usual on a Saturday. Christmas tide is with us, of course, and has been for about a month, and we had bought various deep-frozen poultry specialties. Today had a stuffed turkey roast, with cranberry and apple filling, enough for 7 portions. It was quite boring, but that didn't stop it from going away. Between the 3½ of us (Yvonne hardly eats anything) we nearly finished it. Not to be repeated.
| Sunday, 11 November 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 11 November 2018 |
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Ballarat Bird World again
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Topic: animals, photography | Link here |
Off this morning with Ruth to visit the Ballarat Bird World for the first time in a while; we've been there three times before, all in the relatively short period of time 9 May 2010 to 11 Februrary 2011.
It's an interesting place, but they have always had financial problems, and now they're only open on the weekend. It used to be run by an old married couple, but it seems that the wife died about a year ago, and now the children are taking over the place. Interestingly, on checking the web site, I find that the old pair were Paul and Joan Sperber (nomen est omen? Sperber is German for sparrow hawk). Our car repairman at Ballarat Automotive is also called Paul Sperber. And so is one of old Paul's sons. What are the chances that there are three Paul Sperbers in Ballarat? Could it be that Paul Jr. and Lisa are taking over the operation, or could it be Edward, Paul Jr's younger brother?
Hopefully they'll be able to make a go of it; there was almost nobody there today. And for the first time we couldn't go into the cockatoo cage, but Yvonne had her fun with a Major Mitchell:
Went through rather faster than I had expected: I had brought my Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3 with me to get some photos of the birds in the aviary, but there seemed to be very few there. Were they hiding, or are there really only about 10 in total?
In any case, I was quite happy with the results:
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In particular, the depth of field was about what I would expect. Thinking back to Tony Northrup's claims a few days ago, I'd like to know which Nikon lens he would have used to get these results. The last photo was taken at 1/25 s, focal length 400 mm (full frame equivalent 800 mm). What lenses of that focal length are available for Nikon? I looked at this a couple of months ago: the AF-S NIKKOR 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR (“surprisingly compact” at 4.59 kg) for only USD $17,000. Clearly an absolute specialist lens. At least it has image stabilization (which Nikon calls “vibration reduction”), so it's not clear that it couldn't also have taken this photo. But who can carry a lens like that around with him?
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Hey Google! Botanical Gardens!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
We were finished at Ballarat Bird World earlier than I had expected. What now? Off to the Botanical Gardens? How do we get there? It's on the other side of town, and though I could find my way with no difficulty, I couldn't think of an optimum way. I hadn't learnt from my experience on Friday, and I still didn't have my GPS navigator with me. OK, what's Google good for? Hey, Google, take me to the Botanical Gardens.
It didn't say very much, but showed me a map. In which direction should I set off? It was too polite to assume that I didn't know. In this case I did, of course: we were in a dead end street, so there was only one way to go. After that I got quite reasonable instructions. Hey, Google, thank you. After some consideration, “You're welcome”.
Ruth sees this as proof that mobile telephones are the way to go. That's significantly overstating the case, especially since the directions weren't optimal. In particular, the lack of a map is a nuisance. I had it in my pocket, but even if I had mounted it on the dashboard, the map would be too small to be useful. Still, it's definitely useful.
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Botanical Gardens again
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
To the Botanical Gardens, also for the first time in a while. Down the Prime Ministers' avenue, where it seems that Tony Abbott so shocked the sculptor that he gave up; at least the past two prime ministers are not yet there. And by comparison, the days of Honest John seem positively nostalgic:
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In the Statuary Pavilion, found another Ruth:
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The Friends were selling plants again, and in to say hello. Yvonne Curbach was there, of course, and I introduced Ruth, discovering that Yvonne isn't Dutch after all: she's Indonesian, and though her first language is Dutch, she doesn't like Holland much. Also saw Lorraine Powell. And of course we bought some plants (now $8!): a Fuchsia triphylla and a more normal Fuchsia.
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Burnt leaves and weeding
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Back home planted the normal Fuchsia in front of the house:
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That's the Fuchsia triphylla on the left.
Also noted with mild concern the way the leaves of the newly planted tomatoes and Hibiscus rosa-sinensis have gone white:
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But there's good new growth on the Hibiscus, the buds are looking a lot happier, and I expect to see some flowers soon:
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Ruth agrees with me that it's probably too much sunlight for the old leaves.
Ruth also showed another very positive trait. She loves weeding:
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She's welcome here.
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Blow-dry Wiener Schnitzel
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Wiener Schnitzel for dinner today. Once again I tried some of them in the “digital air fryer”. And once again they tasted better than the ones that were just deep fried. The down side is that the basket only has enough space for three small Schnitzel, and without fat you can't layer them. But it's worth thinking of alternatives.
| Monday, 12 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 12 November 2018 |
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Braving the elements
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
We have planted some of our snow pea plants, but they still look very delicate. Now, however, the ones still in the house are starting to flower. To my surprise, it wasn't even the first flower. There's also a pod on the plant:
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Time to plant them? No, it seems. The ones that I planted three days ago have not exactly improved, and neither have the creepers:
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Why? And what can I do about it?
| Tuesday, 13 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 13 November 2018 |
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The four horsemen, finally
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Nele Kömle showed up this morning, primarily to do something with Chris Bahlo, but of course they didn't miss the opportunity to go riding. Finally we have the Four Horse(wo)men:
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We didn't get round to assigning names. In principle Chris should be war, but she was in civvies today. Then there are questions of colour, which are more complicated than I realized. But there was no white (grey) horse, and assigning the colours red, black and “pale” to the others is difficult enough.
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The joys of GPS tracking
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Ruth took her mobile phone with her riding and recorded the track with an app called Runtastic. She showed it to me on her phone, and the map didn't look bad. I asked her to send me the log. How do you do that? How, indeed? Despite the obvious contradiction, mobile phones are surprisingly isolated. But no, she found a way to send it to me as an email:
Ruth hat ein runtastisches Reiten über 5,83 km in 48m 18s absolviert
https://www.runtastic.com/sport-sessions/4a6e4acc-5caa-4360-9c66-7f3cea9b75ff?sharing_token=5bea382f3b90413c285a589b&share_locale=de&utm_content=session.runtastic.riding&utm_source=runtastic.lite&utm_medium=gplus.android&utm_campaign=user_generated_sharing
Von meinem Xperia™ von Sony-Smartphone gesendet
Why didn't I look at the HTML version? Why, didn't I look at the HTML version? That was HTML, but they were too polite to put the link in an a tag.
OK, paste the link into a browser. “You're not allowed to see this map. Log in or sign up”. No, sorry, Runtastic, I don't want anything to do with you. I just want to see the log, which is Ruth's private property.
Is it on her phone? It's almost worth searching for. But in the meantime I went to put up my track log for Sunday. I've done this on several occasions using GPS Visualizer and then saved the route as a Google Map. But no, that was yesterday. Now I need an API key.
What a pain! The signup took me the best part of 30 minutes (admittedly much longer because I collected screen shots and tried out various things that no sane person would do).
The first time round, the web site hung after I pressed (presumably the wrong) CONTINUE button:
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After that, things seemed to go around in circles. I seemed to get this page several times with slightly different reactions:
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And then it wanted my credit card number (“just checking”):
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Sorry, Google, I really don't trust you. But it's documented here that you want the number (be careful not to lose it!). So I entered my credit card number the way it is on the credit card, with spaces after every group of four digits. And like always (web programmers seem to live in an alternate universe), it flagged “credit card number invalid”.
This time, however, it proved that it was right. I had a typo in the number. Fix that, and it accepted the card number with spaces. One point to Google. It seems that it checks whatever inbuilt validity checks there are in credit card numbers (checksum? CRC?).
But it still wasn't happy:
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OK, Google, what does “optional” mean? Deduct one point from Google. So I gave it my answer-only phone number and was finally presented with:
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10 APIs! I'm reminded of xkcd:
But then it was done, and finally I was presented with:
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There was no option to reply. Clearly it doesn't want to know much about me.
And finally I have my map, except that I can no longer embed it in a web page (or if I can, they've done a good job of hiding it):
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It's not clear what the purpose of the apple symbol at bottom left is, but it doesn't produce a menu. Apart from that, the map doesn't seem to be very accurate either. But I suppose that's what you get for having your GPS receiver in your shirt pocket. And the straight line in the middle of the noose? “Sorry, forgot where I was” on the part of the phone.
Sigh
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Sex party next weekend?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
While walking the dogs, got a strange phone call. In fact, any call on my mobile phone is strange. I've forgotten the name of the caller, but he said that he was from the Reason Party. What? Oh, how about a sex party? Do I know that? No, at any rate not as a political party.
It seems that somebody has put me down as a sympathizer or similar, and he didn't just want me to vote for them: he wanted me to help on election day (next Saturday). He had my phone number (obviously) and my canonical email address. I asked him to send me some information, but I didn't receive any.
| Wednesday, 14 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 14 November 2018 |
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Another circuit breaker trip
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Once again this morning the circuit breaker for the kitchen (and much of the house) had tripped. Now that eureka is on a different circuit, it's no longer as serious as I had feared. But what is it? Last time I had suspected the bore pump, but it's definitely not that, and the other pump is on a different circuit.
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New caquelon
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Ruth's been here for nearly a week now, but today was the first real opportunity that we had to inaugurate the new caquelon that she brought with her (to replace the old one that we damaged a couple of months ago:
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The fondue tasted as good as ever, but the differences in the caqlelons were clear: on the old one, the réligieuse looked more like a monk's tonsure, because the base wasn't perfectly flat. It also took some lifting. The new one (still) has a perfectly flat and smooth base, so the réligieuse was too, and it was easy to remove.
The most interesting thing, though, was the recipe booklet included with the caquelon. Some of the recipes look pretty bizarre, but the first one („Fondue - das Traditionelle“ / « Fondue - La traditionelle ») was surprising because it was almost identical to our own. That might seem obvious, but there's so much junk out there that the similarity is amazing.
By way of illustration, the first few Google hits I have for cheese fondue recipe. All recipes are for four people unless otherwise noted:
BBC:
| 1 clove | garlic, halved | |
| 290ml/½ pint | white wine | |
| 1 tsp | lemon juice | |
| 225g/8oz | emmental cheese grated | |
| 225g/8oz | gruyère cheese grated | |
| 1 tsp | cornflour | |
| 1 tbsp | kirsch (optional) |
Apart from the use of obsolete units (with a sting in the tail for US readers: the ½ pint is the Imperial pint, round 20% more than the US Customary pint, and theoretically capable of ruining the dish), the choice of cheese is not just suboptimal, it's wrong: never use Emmental cheese in a fondue. And even for US readers, the quantity of wine is too much. For 450 g of cheese you need between 200 and 225 ml of wine. I won't comment on other details of the recipe, like boiling the little Kirsch with the fondue to completely destroy the flavour. And the quantities are far too small for the claimed 4 people. You need about 200 g of cheese per person (though at home we use a little over 300 g total because Yvonne doesn't eat much).
Sandra Bernard's classic French cheese fondue (an attribution presumably made by SBS, who are good at these things) is better: 800 g Gruyère cheese, but nothing else, and 375 ml of wine to go with it. But only one kind of cheese? Possible, not ideal.
| 1 | garlic clove | |
| 800 g | Gruyère cheese (or a cheese with a sweet, fruity flavour) | |
| 375 ml | dry white wine | |
| 1 tbsp | cornflour | |
| 4 tbsp | Kirschwasser (cherry liqueur) |
Still, this one looks reasonably OK, just different from ours.
This recipe turns me off even before I read the recipe itself:
Easy cheese fondue recipe with white wine is a perfect gourmet appetizer that you can make at home!
The ingredients are similar to the first:
| 1 | Garlic Clove, grated | |
| 1 cup | dry White Wine | |
| 200 grams / .4 pounds | Emmentaler cheese (at room temperature) | |
| 200 grams / .4 pounds | Gruyère cheese (at room temperature) | |
| 50 grams / .1 pound | Smoked Cheddar (at room temperature) | |
| 2 tablespoons | Cornstarch | |
| 1 tablespoon fresh | Lemon Juice |
By comparison with the BBC recipe, it uses even less cheese (assuming 4 people), but then they want to eat this heavy dish as an appetizer. A good fondue is pretty much the opposite. Emmental again, and smoked cheddar! Certainly not traditionel.
OK, maybe looking for English-language recipes is a bad idea. How about French? recette fondue fromage? This one is convenient because, although it's originally in French, there's an English translation. On the other hand, even the French version contains cups and spoons and things, making it less plausible. It wants:
| 2 small | garlic cloves, lightly crushed | |
| 14 oz (400 g) | cave-aged Gruyère cheese, grated | |
| 3.5 oz (100 g) | Emmentaler Swiss cheese, grated | |
| 3.5 oz (100 g) | Swiss Vacherin cheese, grated | |
| 4 tsp | cornstarch | |
| Freshly ground black pepper, to taste | ||
| Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste | ||
| 1 1/4 cups (310 ml) | Riesling (or other dry white wine) | |
| 4 tsp (20 ml) | Kirsch (optional) | |
Emmental again! But mercifully not too much. And Vacherin, certainly not a bad idea. And for my taste a little too much wine, but the traditions vary.
This one (for six people) looks good at first sight:
| 400 g | de gruyère suisse | |
| 200 g | d'appenzeller | |
| 200 g | de vacherin Fribourgeois (à ne pas confondre avec le Vacherin Mont-d'Or) | |
| 200 g | de tilsit | |
| 30 cl | de vin blanc sec | |
| 1 cuillère à café | de maïzena | |
| 5 cl | de kirsch |
No garlic. No lemon juice. And four different cheeses! Three of them are classics (and this is the first mention of Appenzeller cheese), but Tilsit cheese? If there's one thing I've learnt about fondue in the last 45 years, it's that only cheeses from Switzerland and the Jura are suitable. I wouldn't risk 1 kg of cheese on the Tilsit being an improvement. Also, this recipe has the lowest ratio of wine to cheese yet, only 300 ml of wine for 1 kg of cheese.
So it should be clear how little I expected the recipe from the caquelon to match our own. But we have, for four portions, slightly adjusted for normal portions and cheese type, and guessing some of the quantities, like “clove of garlic“:
| Ingredient | Groggy | Stöckli | Recipe 1 | Recipe 2 | Recipe 3 | Recipe 4 | Recipe 5 | |||||||
| Garlic | 15 g | 15 g | 5 g | 5 g | 5 g | 7 g | ||||||||
| Cornflour | 20g | 20 g | 15 g | 20 g | 15 g | 10 g | ||||||||
| Gruyère | 600 g | 600 g | 225 g | 800 g | 200 g | 400 g | 400 g | |||||||
| Appenzell | 200 g | 200 g | 200 g | |||||||||||
| Vacherin | 100 g | 200 g | ||||||||||||
| Ememntal | 225 g | 200 g | 100 g | |||||||||||
| Tilsit | 200 g | |||||||||||||
| Cheddar | ||||||||||||||
| Wine | 370 ml | 350 ml | 290 ml | 375 g | 238 ml | 310 ml | 300 ml | |||||||
| Lemon juice | 20 ml | 20 ml | 5 ml | |||||||||||
| Kirsch | 60 ml | 50 ml | 15 ml | 80 ml | 20 ml | 50 ml | ||||||||
| Ratio cheese/wine | 2.16 | 2.3 | 1.55 | 2.13 | 1.68 | 2.58 | 3.33 | |||||||
Clearly there's room for differences in the recipes, and also for individual taste. My own recipe has changed from a ratio of 4:1 Gruyère to Appenzeller to a ratio of 3:1. On the whole, recipe 2 doesn't look too bad, though you need a very good single cheese. And Vacherin is an excellent fondue cheese, but we can't get it here (though I suggested it to Kevin Teather of the last month). And many recipes suggest pepper and nutmeg, though I find that they only help if the cheese is second-rate. And the difference in wine:cheese ratios (2:1!) is amazing.
| Thursday, 15 November 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 15 November 2018 |
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Sovereign Hill again
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Topic: general, photography, opinion | Link here |
Off to Ballarat today to meet CJ Ellis, dressed up in his costume, and visit Sovereign Hill again. Things didn't start off well. When we got there, I discovered that I had no footwear. Never mind, this has happened before; that's why I keep a spare pair of thongs in the back of the car. Dug for them: not there! And while doing so, I managed to turf my camera out of the car and on to the parking lot. Two dropped (same) cameras in less than a week! And this time there was no panorama head to protect it, and it sustained damage:
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The lens was (mercifully) again untouched, the camera still works, and the marks look pretty superficial. The camera still works, but I should really stop dropping the thing.
In to buy tickets, while Yvonne went off looking for footwear for me. It was definitely necessary. There are some places where I can walk barefoot with few problems, but Sovereign Hill is not one of them. By the time Yvonne got back, we hadn't got very far, but I really couldn't continue much further.
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Met Yvonne at the entrance. By the time we got back, CJ was panning for gold for Ruth:
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On up the hill. It's been nearly 10 years since we were last here, and things have changed—for the better. They now have a school, full of schoolchildren. And with CJ dressed the way he was, he was welcomed, and he told a story about wanting a school for his nieces who would shortly arrive by ship from the Old Country:
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On to see CJ's favourites, the old steam machinery:
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By then it was lunch time, and CJ disappeared by himself while we looked round the main street:
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CJ had wanted to take us to see the wheel wrights after lunch, but the girls decided differently and went to see the gold pouring instead, in light that was barely visible. I missed having the right lens with me, and was limited to the Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7 from my E-PM1:
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It would have been a good use for the barely used M.Zuiko 45 mm f/1.8 or the M.Zuiko 75 mm f/1.8. Next time.
Then down Red Hill Mine and got rather more photos than last time:
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The last image was taken with the E-PM1 at 36°/3200 ISO, clearly more than it can really sustain.
Finally a trooper came along to check the mining licenses. It was a bit tame compared with last time, where Carola was clapped in irons:
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About the only excitement was when one of the volunteers, a somewhat overweight woman, slipped in front of the trooper round about here:
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She confirmed that it wasn't part of the act, and I had to help her up. The trooper then sent her off to have herself looked at, before talking to the others and setting off in pursuit of an errant miner:
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We finally found him in the main street, having grabbed somebody, though it's not clear that they were miners:
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And then we had had enough for the day. We're not as young as we used to be. If it weren't for the high entry fees, it would be nice to spread it over several days. Still, Ruth was very pleasantly surprised; I think she had initially not been very enthusiastic
As we were leaving, CJ asked me how old I was. In principle he knows: 10 years younger than he. But it seems that I'm entitled to a “Pioneer Pass”, a service so secret that I couldn't find any useful reference to it on the web site. It's available to people of the age of 70 or over who live in or near Ballarat (post code areas 3350 to 3358; we're in 3352). And it entitles the bearer to unlimited free entrance to Sovereign Hill and the Gold Museum. Filled out the form and was issued immediate access. Now if only he had told me that before we entered!
The good news is, of course, that I can go back and take specific photos whenever I want. That could be quite worthwhile.
| Friday, 16 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 16 November 2018 |
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Garden flowers in late spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Middle of November; spring is going by quickly, and it's time for the “flowers in late spring” series.
There's nothing much to see this month. The dead trees are dead, and the others aren't doing that much better, though there are signs that the Paulownia kawakamii might be growing a little faster. Other plants have reacted more obviously to the relatively generous load of fertilizer that I gave them, notably the roses:
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That's all the more interesting because the Tropaeolum in the middle are not flowering particularly strongly, in contrast with the ones in front of the water tank:
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A couple of plants are flowering or coming up to flowering, I think for the first time: the Adenanthos sericeus (“woolly bush”, the small but brilliant Carpobrotus species that flowers all too shortly, and one of many Hebes that seem to be benefiting from the fertilizer:
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And this, I think, is a Artemesia species. But which?
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Bird harassment
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Ruth discovered something interesting this evening:
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A (small) family of Australian wood ducks walking across the paddock, not far from where our pond used to be 4 years ago. I wonder if they were looking for it.
But more importantly, a couple of magpies took exception to their presence. I've seen them chase other animals before, notably foxes, but this is the first time I've seen them chase ducks.
| Saturday, 17 November 2018 | Dereel → Maits Rest → 12 Apostles → Port Campbell → Dereel | Images for 17 November 2018 |
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Great Ocean Road again
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Topic: general, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Off relatively early this morning with Nikolai and Leonid to visit the Great Ocean Road again. To my surprise, it's only the third time that Yvonne and I have been there together, and the last time was nearly 10 years ago. And in that time the public has not only changed completely, but become much more.
On the way stopped to show Ruth a Callistemon (bottlebrush):
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Further on found a number of purple-flowering bushes:
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Yvonne was rather taken with them, and we broke off a short twig and took it home. To my surprise, it survived, and Yvonne wants to try to propagate it.
First to Mait's Rest, where things were not in as good a state as last time we were there. In particular, I had wanted to take a repeat of this photo:
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The tree (fern) was still there, and possibly a bit bigger, but the whole area was cordoned off because the platform was unsafe.
From there down towards Cape Otway to look for the Koalas that used to be there in great numbers. We found a couple, but nothing like as many as five years ago, and I didn't get much in the way of photos:
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Thence to the Twelve Apostles. Weather was good, but we've seen it before. More panorama attempts, the best of which is this one:
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Yvonne was on a Borzoi sales trip, finding many interested people:
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It seems that dogs aren't allowed there. They go to great lengths to make that clear:
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Where's the “no dogs” sign? It's in the first image:
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We missed that one and didn't see anything until we were nearly at the end of the way. Far too late to take the dogs back...
Then on to Port Campbell, where the dogs saw seawater for the first time:
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I get the impression that they're not very interested:
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Definitely a difference from Nemo.
We had the option of continuing to Warrnambool, but the ladies had had enough, so back home after that.
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GPS pain, alleviated
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Last year we had a pretty average catastrophe trying to get to Halls Gap with the “aid” of a GPS navigator. Today wasn't as bad: firstly, we knew the way pretty well (though finding Mait's Rest wasn't that obvious), and secondly I had researched the route online with Google Maps and then sent the route to my phone, even being careful enough to test to ensure that it got there.
So when we set off, it was a little surprising to discover that the route wasn't there. I had tested it the first time, but not the second one. So I had to used the first one, which only took me to the Koala place on Cape Otway. And when we got to Colac, my car navigator and my phone disagreed. Ruth fired up hers too so that we could at least get a majority. But my phone came up with all sorts of nonsense, like telling me to turn right where there was absolutely no turnoff, and mentioning road names that didn't exist. My best guess was that it lost signal and was too polite to tell me so. But there's nothing obvious from the track that suggests that:
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On top of that, the damned thing kept beeping at frequent but irregular intervals. If it gave any indication on the display, it was too fast for Yvonne. Why do phones do that? They go to immense lengths to do voice recognition, sometimes successfully. Why can't they do the much simpler task of voice generation to say what they want?
| Sunday, 18 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 18 November 2018 |
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The fun of photography
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Topic: photography, technology, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Spent most of today writing up and processing photos for the past two days, and I still didn't get finished. Once again I ran into issues with panoramas including the sea:
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Maybe I should have taken a fisheye lens with me to get a single photo of the sea to blend into the panorama.
And in the evening Ruth did some cooking. OK, take a photo for souvenir's sake. It's so simple now that we have the flash units in place.
Well, no:
The first time round the flash didn't fire. Dammit, these contacts are really an issue.
The second time round the flash didn't fire. Further checking showed that this was the flash trigger with the on/off switch. Maybe I should leave it on.
The third time round the flash didn't fire. Dammit, these contacts are really an issue.
The fourth time round the flash finally fired. And it was overexposed! I had the thing set to auto-ISO, so modulo noise (39°/6400 ISO), in fact the first three images were almost OK:
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Only the flash one was hopelessly overexposed.
And then the display on the back of the camera went dead! Instead I got everything only through the viewfinder. Delayed damage from dropping the camera? Took off the viewfinder cup and it worked. Somehow I must have managed to mis-position it in a way that caused the automatic viewfinder switch to trigger. After repositioning it, the camera worked normally.
And later in the evening I decided to take some photos without the kitchen flash—and without checking the exposure. Bad idea:
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That doesn't look that bad, but it's clearly dark despite multiple attempts to recover it.
| Monday, 19 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 19 November 2018 |
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Ubuntu for CJ
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
CJ Ellis' computer is so infected with viruses (I think) that the best thing appears to be to reinstall the OS. But on discussing it on IRC, people suggested that I should avoid Microsoft and install Ubuntu instead.
I resisted. Why? I really have very little love for Microsoft, but if I install Ubuntu, I alone will be responsible for support. But on thinking about it, the idea didn't sound that bad. I seem to end up doing it anyway, and certainly there will be less infections with Ubuntu. So I downloaded the 18.04 LTS version and installed.
Installation was much as I feared. It started off by identifying the existing FreeBSD installation:
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For some reason (probably the keyboard) I managed to enter the password incorrectly several times, culminating (as I discovered) in entering the same incorrect password twice, meaning that I couldn't log in after rebooting.
How do you recover from this in Ubuntu? In FreeBSD you would boot single-user and reset. But how do you boot single user in Ubuntu? It's even too polite to show me the boot messages. Again, IRC to the rescue:
Tried both, and they didn't work. Looking online told me that the SHIFT key was correct, but that it “didn't always work”.
I've noticed on some systems that timing when to hit the left Shift key can be tricky, sometimes I miss it and need to try it again.
Dammit, boot from DVD and see if that helped, noting once again how glacially slow the boot process is. This page was of some help, though in principle it was pretty obvious:
The only thing that wasn't obvious was the chroot.
After that, setting up the system. How I HATE these colours that they insist on producing. Apart from the fact that they're far too gaudy, all assume a terminal with bright (white?) text on a black background. Make it sane and you get something like this:
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My background isn't completely white, which makes it (barely) possible to see the white text.
I've noted how to do this before, by fixing a file called /etc/DIR_COLORS. But that's an old, worn-out magic word. More searching online gave me that ls and grep are aliases deliberately intended to annoy with these colours. Unalias and they behave normally. But apt isn't like that, and I haven't found a way to get around it. I tried resetting the TERM environment variable to something monochrome, but that didn't interest it. WHAT a pain!
Apart from that, yet another GUI to get used to. As they proudly announce:
Image title: Ubuntu 3 Dimensions: 4266 x 3112, 3709 kB Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Monday, 19 November 2018, thumbnails All images taken on Monday, 19 November 2018, small Diary entry for Monday, 19 November 2018 Complete exposure details
Ubuntu 18.04 works differently from older versions
They don't say why they have changed things.
Still, after some pain I got things installed. I hope that CJ can come to terms with it.
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First outdoor Hibiscus
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The Hibiscus rosa-sinensis that I planted last week is recovering, and today the first flower bloomed:
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Nothing spectacular, but that's a plant that I've been tending for over 10 years, and this is the first cutting that I have planted outside, so it seemed to be something of an achievement.
Also got round to taking more photos of the flowers that Ruth picked on Saturday. They have certainly lasted well, considering that they were stuck in the ventilator grille of the car all day before being put in water. Here hopefully enough to identify them:
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More HDR comparisons
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I had intended to do more work on Saturday's photos today, but somehow I didn't get round to it. But it's interesting to compare two individual photos that I took:
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Which looks better? The first is merged from a group of 3 photos taken hand-held at 3 EV intervals, and the second is an in-camera “HDR2” image. Sorry, I still can't find any use for in-camera HDR.
These were the images as processed at the time. After optimizing them, there was little difference to be seen:
Image title: Apostles 5 Dimensions: 5177 x 3882, 5004 kB Display location on map Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Saturday, 17 November 2018, thumbnails All images taken on Saturday, 17 November 2018, small Diary entry for Saturday, 17 November 2018 Complete exposure details
Image title: Apostles 5 HDR2 Dimensions: 5187 x 3888, 4769 kB Display location on map Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Saturday, 17 November 2018, thumbnails All images taken on Saturday, 17 November 2018, small Diary entry for Saturday, 17 November 2018 Complete exposure details
But the criticism remains.
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Do you exist?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Another letter for Yvonne today from Carsat, the French social security department, asking for an “attestation d'existence”, close enough to English to be obvious.
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That makes sense: people die, and somehow they have to know when they can stop paying. But look at the date! 25 October, nearly a month ago! And they want an answer by 11 December, or they will stop pension payments. If it's that urgent, they could at least have sent it by airmail, rather then storing it in Belgium for a few weeks.
| Tuesday, 20 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 20 November 2018 |
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More Ubuntu installation pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So I have Ubuntu installed on CJ's computer. Now to make it easier to use.
Not much, really. But it took all day. TeamViewer had exactly what I wanted: a package for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, along with instructions But trying to install it was like pulling teeth:
=== root@cj (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog/Downloads 5 -> dpkg -i teamviewer_14.0.12762_amd64.deb
Doesn't that make FreeBSD's pkg look good! OK, clearly it wants Qt installed. Went looking for that. apt is too polite to assume that you don't know any names, so there's no search function (or it's also renamed so that I can't find it). Back to memories of 15 years ago... apt-cache search, that obviously named program. But no, no qt. After fighting my way through hundreds of packages, finally decided on libqt5core5a, having successfully ignored the text libqt5gui5 in the vomit from dpkg.
OK, on and try to install that:
=== root@cj (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog/Downloads 19 -> apt install libqt5core5a
Isn't that useful? “It (the dependency) is not going to be installed”. OK, let's try to fix the breakage that I didn't cause:
=== root@cj (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog/Downloads 20 -> apt --fix-broken install
And then it installed everything! But what a pain. Others on IRC even agreed. How does a non-technical user handle this kind of pain?
So I set up TeamViewer and established that it worked. Next, “sleep”. Yes, that worked too, and when I came back things still seemed to be OK. Except that TeamViewer no longer worked. The message wasn't helpful: “Not ready. Please check your connection”, implying a network connection.. OK, let's check the connection. It's fine. What next? There's no “retry” button.
Reboot? Yes, works. Sleep and resume. No, doesn't work. So clearly there's a connection. More web scouring to confirm that I was not alone, and that there were various suggestions about stopping and restarting the teamviewer daemon, none of which helped. This one, from the TeamViewer community, jumped to conclusions that it was a DNS issue (it wasn't), and suggests an inappropriate way to set up DNS. This one, from the Ubuntu community, at least told me how to restart the service, but that didn't help either. About the only obvious thing was that the deamon couldn't reinstate its PID.
And somewhere along the line I got this popup:
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OK, what does that mean? Pressed “Report problem” and it told me, yes, indeed, it had reported the problem. But it didn't say to whom, and told me absolutely nothing about its nature. That's disgusting.
Another less irritating indication of the sloppiness was
starting chrome chromium chromium-browser:
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Normally, I suppose, all of that goes into /dev/null.
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Nokia 3: dead?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Went walking with the dogs today, as always, taking my phone with me for GPS location. When I got back, it was completely unresponsive. I couldn't even get it to boot. It shouldn't have been the battery: it had been on charge until I left with the dogs. Discussion on IRC, and “ibiza” came up with this video showing how to take the thing apart, not something that I wanted to do on a phone less than two months old and thus still under warranty.
But while I was watching it, the phone started to boot, after at least 5 minutes of silence. What caused that? Should I have it exchanged anyway?
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Dinner with the Marriotts
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Over to the Marriotts next door this evening for dinner. It's been nearly five years since we last sat on this verandah and agreed to buy the Stones Road property:
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Pleasant evening, even if everybody looked pointedly at Diane for drinking tea after the meal:
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Still more flash problems
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I really have nothing but trouble with on-camera flash. Going to the Marriotts this evening, I decided not to take the mecablitz 58 AF-2, and took the gutless FL-LM3 flash that came with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, and of which Olympus thinks so highly that they don't have a description page.
Things didn't go well. This photo could almost have been OK, but the lens got in the way:
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OK, how about bounce flash?
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Why so dark? OK, back to normal flash:
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It wasn't until later that I discovered that I had the flash settings to manual, 1/10 power. Or did I? Looking at the settings (also later), it told me that it was set to full power. Is this an issue with the settings or with the Exif data? On the face of it, with the Exif data: it has a guide number of only 12.9 at 24°/400 ISO, so 1/10 would mean a guide number of 4.1 would only illuminate up to 1 m correctly at the f/4 that I used for the photos. The first photo clearly has more illumination than that. In addition, the Exif data claim that it's fill-in, not manual.
Why is this stuff all so complicated?
| Wednesday, 21 November 2018 | Dereel → Springdallah → Dereel | |
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Visit from Anke Hawke
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Topic: general, animals, opinion | Link here |
Anke Hawke is coming for a couple of days to hold a clinic at Chris Bahlo's place. We already have Ruth in the guest room, so we put Anke in the room opposite my office, variously called music room and library. And that meant the first ever use of the sofa bed that we bought in May. We even had to unpack the (separate) mattress from the plastic packing:
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Anke arrived in the evening, somewhat tired, so we ate, the girls spoke about horses, and went to bed. It's interesting to note the composition of the participants: Anke, of course, and also (of course) Ruth, Chris, and Yvonne. Then Nele Kömle and her friend Silke, and somebody called Meg, whom I haven't met yet. Meg has the distinction of being the only person who doesn't have German as her native language. I get the feeling that she might end up missing something.
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Finishing CJ's computer
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
In principle CJ's computer is ready, but I can't rely on TeamViewer to recover after hibernating. What alternatives do I have? ssh, of course, and that works (after all, it does come from the BSD space). But I want something that will display the “desktop”. And how about that, Ubuntu has a solution, “remote console”. OK, set that up, after more web searches and discovering that you can't configure it if the desired network connection isn't active. But then it said, sure, all up and running.
What do I use to connect to it? None of the documentation tells you that, just how to set it up on the Ubuntu side, something like the sound of one hand clapping. Finally found out: use TightVNC. And then I discovered that the configuration had lied. Nothing was listening on the port. I had to reboot (echoes of Microsoft) to get any response. That's particularly silly when the link has to be up to configure it in the first place, and maybe it wasn't necessary, but without any other information it was the only thing I could try.
Finally got a connection, sort of:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~ 76 -> vncviewer cj.lemis.com
Huh? Read the TightVNC man page. No mention of any security options.
More web searches, and came across a number like this page: disable security on Ubuntu.
Ugh. This is wrong for so many reasons:
Sorry, Ubuntu, this is unacceptable.
Still, maybe all of this isn't necessary. It's not clear why TeamViewer failed after resumption, and maybe it wouldn't happen at CJ's place. In any case, I needed to go over to check that he could still access the Internet. So went over (17 km) and set it up. The Internet connection worked out of the box. That's not that much of a surprise, since it's a straight DHCP connection, but it was also not a foregone conclusion.
But suspend/resume still doesn't work right. In fact, after resuming, the Internet connection didn't come back at all. So for the time being he'll just have to shut down, which has the side effect of hiding the TeamViewer bug. And all my attempts to set up remote console were a waste of time: I had forgotten that he was behind NAT, so neither remote console nor ssh would work.
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Ubuntu: no, thanks
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've installed Ubuntu several times over the last 13 years. Every time I have decided that it wasn't for me. So why did I install it for CJ? His requirements are pretty standard, and Ubuntu seemed to be a good match, so the install and usage should have been a no-brainer.
They weren't. In fact, I get the feeling that Ubuntu has become less usable since I last tried it. Certain aspects are unforgivable:
It's probable that there are solutions or workarounds for all of these problems, but the real issue is that they exist in the first place. I could probably find a fix, but I'm not the target audience for Ubuntu—as I've said before, Ubuntu is trying to be a better Microsoft. They're failing badly. If I run into significant further issues, I'll wipe it and reinstall Microsoft.
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Internet in 20 years: signs of the times
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
It's been nearly 5 years since I wrote my essay “The future of the Internet”, predicting what the Internet (and the world) will be like in 2034. Today I received another indication. TV is being overtaken by Internet services:
That's one of the things that I predicted:
Radio and TV broadcasts will gradually cease. They are costly: they use a lot of power, and that transmission and reception equipment are also expensive. Even now it is possible to receive TV via the Internet: a recent report found that in Western countries, 90% of Internet users watched online video. Significant investment in net backbones will be required to deliver the content, but it will still be cheaper than maintaining current transmission equipment. This change in the distribution method will also allow video on demand to take the place of fixed broadcasts.
Personally I no longer use broadcast TV, though I still receive radio. But that's out of convenience, and a lot of my “radio” reception is via the web from Radio Swiss Classic.
| Thursday, 22 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 22 November 2018 |
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Cassoulet revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Clinic evening meal today. They had wanted to go to the Little Hard Hills pub in Enfield, but in the end it turned out that apart from Ruth, Chris Bahlo and Anke, only Meg Romanis was interested in the dinner, so we decided to make it here.
Over the years, Yvonne has gradually improved her opinion of cassoulet. There was a time when I could only eat it when she was travelling, but when I suggested Dereel Chile, she countered with cassoulet.
Surprisingly, she even suggested making a bigger portion. I had made my recipe for a 3 litre cassole, and she thought that it wouldn't be enough. So she went and bought a bigger one, 3.7 l:
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Or at least that's what it said on the packing. Measuring it told me that measurements aren't a very good way of establishing the volume. Was that height 10.5 cm or 11.5 cm? That makes the difference between 3.3 l and 3.65 l. OK, fill it with water and weigh. To my surprise, my “3 litre” cassole only held 2.5 kg of water, and the new one holds 3.8 l, effectively 50% more.
And the recipe? Ruth had found some meaty cooked duck legs, and the original recipe wanted “double-smoked sausage”, which sounded like what ALDI now sells as “Rookwurst”. A bit of lamb to make up the weight, and we were in business.
The other issue I had was too much juice, something I had never been able to get under control. Today I tried adding the tinned tomatoes at the beginning, so that the juice was part of the initial liquid. I then baked it in the oven the way I do for baked beans. And that proved to be sufficient: the quantities, both of the cassoulet itself and the liquid, was arguably perfect (Yvonne argued that it was perfect, I thought a bit more liquid could be a good thing).
The result was quite satisfying:
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Now was also time to update the recipe. The previous version dates from November 2006.
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Off the net?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While looking at something on the web in the lounge room this afternoon, I lost connectivity to the Internet. Into the office to look at the NTD. All normal. ifconfig?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/15) ~/public_html 33 -> ifconfig xl0
All OK, right? Well, no. That IP address is “wrong”, and the net mask seemed to be so as well, so much so that I thought that something might have gone wrong, especially as I couldn't ping the default gateway.
OK, try resetting the IP address to the old value. No go, but that in itself wasn't unexpected.
Called up the Aussie Broadband support line. 16 people in the queue ahead of me! Clearly something had gone seriously wrong. But while I was waiting, it dawned on me that I had seen this before. Firewall! Yes, of course, it needs to know the IP address range to accept, and also the IP address for NAT to forward to.
OK, disable all firewall rules. And I could ping the remote servers again. So it seems that the drastic change in topology was intentional. Why didn't they warn me? Why should they? I suppose the normal router/firewall boxes (“modem”) that everybody uses don't have an issue with this kind of change.
The more I looked, the more I found to change:
In /etc/rc.ipfw (my simplified version of /etc/rc.firewall), change the gateway IP address:
Stop natd.
Reload firewall rules.
Restart natd:
I think that this is necessary to ensure that things work correctly.
Update my DNS configuration. For reasons that I forget, but which are important, I have my local web server listening on the external interface, and that had changed:
In ~grog/public_html/php/header.php, change the local server address to be able to recognize local access:
Update ~/bin/linkcheck to show the new remote end of the link:
Isn't that simple? I was back online at 16:45, after about 27 minutes. But clearly writing this down for next time is a good idea. An even better idea would be to ensure that the system weathered this kind of change without manual intervention.
| Friday, 23 November 2018 | Dereel | |
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More MediathekView issues
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
One of the first things I do every morning is to download the film list for MediathekView. And today, once again, I got one of these silly messages:
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“Loading the film list didn't work”. I've investigated this before and found that it was a timeout for reasons that I couldn't establish. But this time it happened immediately. Not a timeout. More investigation showed that the application was getting an HTTP 403 error. Why?
More investigation, including installing a newer version of MediathekView. That didn't help, but caused problems of its own. Finally I found that the proxy server (ffm.lemis.com) was refusing to honour the request. Why? Squid configuration: it only accepts requests from my external IP address, and that has changed.
So: one more item on my “IP address change” list. Modify /usr/local/etc/squid/squid.conf and restart amazingly slowly:
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Network flakiness
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While trying to understand my download issues, discovered a lot of:
=== grog@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 1 -> Write failed: Broken pipe
The first time is reported locally in the AEDT time zone (UTC+11), and the second is reported from the remote site in UTC, so this represents a session duration of only 15 minutes. Given that the timeout can take a minute or two, this is really unacceptable. In the course of the day I counted over 40 disconnections.
Why? They happened with both remote sites, and they only started after the IP address change, so it's reasonable to assume that it's related. Sent a written problem report to Aussie Broadband, and once again didn't get even an automatic confirmation with ticket number. It really looks as if I need to contact them on the phone. But explaining the issue to even their relatively clued-up support people won't be easy. Time to log traffic to see if I can work out what's going on.
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Traffic chaos
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Today was the second and final day of the Anke Hawke clinic, and Meg Romanis was going to take her to the airport. But her flight was cancelled! It seems that Sydney had a dust storm yesterday, and all day today it was so windy that only one of the three runways at Sydney airport was open. She spent a lot of time frantically looking for an alternative, but in the end the best she could do was tomorrow morning at 6:00.
Where could she spend the night? We're a good 90 minutes from the airport, and she should be there 2 hours before takeoff, so that would mean leaving here at 2:30. It would have made much more sense to spend the night near the airport, but of course the hotels were booked out: the Melbourne to Sydney stretch is one of the busiest in the world.
So she came back here. Mercifully, Meg's husband, whom none of us have met, was prepared to come out here and take her to the airport. They decided on leaving at 3:15 in the assumption that the “2 hours in advance” rule didn't apply to the early morning flights. Hopefully they're right.
| Saturday, 24 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 24 November 2018 |
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Goodbye, Anke
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Anke must have disappeared as planned during the night; I didn't hear anything, but we later heard from her that she was back in Sydney, though the news also clarified that traffic wouldn't be back to normal until the evening.
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No hot water, again
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Topic: Stones Road house, general, opinion | Link here |
The weather has been cool and dark for a couple of days ago, and this morning we discovered we had no hot water: the circuit breaker in the hot water service had failed again. High time to get somebody to look at it before the warranty expires.
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Victoria votes
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Topic: general | Link here |
Off with Ruth to the Dereel hall this morning to vote in the state elections. All interesting for Ruth, of course, who was impressed by a number of things, including the lack of dress code.
There were four people outside distributing flyers for their three parties: a very bored member of the Australian Labor Party, who didn't want to answer any of my questions. I asked him if he was a member of a trade union, which he confirmed, in the process also confirming my prejudice against trade union members.
Then somebody representing the Liberal Party of Australia, who happily told me that they were planning even more police (“More speed traps?” “Probably”) and mandatory sentencing, which to me looks like putting discretion into the “too hard” basket.
Then two girls from the Australian Greens party, offering increased emphasis on renewable energy, and explaining that in some countries, such as Germany, all energy is renewable. We had to put her right there.
But maybe I'm being unfair to these people; after all, I myself had received a request (which I could only too easily turn down) to do the same thing for the Reason Party.
| Sunday, 25 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 25 November 2018 |
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IP address change, day 3
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
My change of IP address is pretty much complete, but I'm still having these continual dropouts:
That's a connection of only five minutes! I've established that it doesn't happen if I transfer data regularly, but that's not my intention.
And then some interesting stuff on IRC:
What does that mean? ASEA Brown Boveri? Interestingly, that's what Peter Jeremy thought too. It took me a while to discover that it meant Aussie Broadband.
And CGNAT? Carrier-grade NAT, something I had never heard of. He went on to say:
And sure enough, my new IP address, 100.64.51.240, was right in the middle of that range. And as a result, there's no way to contact my external address. I'm not overly concerned about others using my squid caches, but it's just untidy.
On Thursday I asked “Why didn't they warn me?”. But then I thought it was just an IP address change, nothing as invasive as CGNAT.
More IRC discussion:
And there I read, from Peter Ansell of Aussie Broadband:
CG-NAT will be the default option for new NBN services that terminate on our Port Melbourne POI starting tomorrow. We will begin migrating existing customers over very soon. If you would like to opt out ahead of time you can do so by calling the support team (1300 880 905) and request as much. You will be asked to provide a reason when doing so (requires port forwarding etc).
Somehow that's just wrong. The people on Whirlpool are, for the most page, not Aussie customers, and yet the customers didn't find out. The good news is that I can opt out. The bad news is that it took me several days to find out what was going on.
And Mungi? I've never heard of them before. It seems that they were an ISP that closed down recently, though it's really difficult to find information. Once again Whirlpool seems to be the best source (since all others are worse, to misquote Jawaharlal Nehru). So a lot more customers for other providers.
Later in the day mail from somebody who would rather not have me mention his name:
Long time reader of your diary here. Regarding your latest issues with your Internet, your 100.64.0.0/10 IP address indicates that you have been moved behind CGNAT.
This will break access to any services that you previously exposed/hosted from your home connection, such as SSHd or a Web Server. I also notice you are whitelisting yourself on remote systems, such as your proxy, by IP. Now that you are behing CGNAT, it is very likely this external address will change often, and is also being shared by other CGNAT'ed users.
The good news is that if this causes you trouble, you can opt out of CGNAT, with further information available at https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2767077. This will return you back to a reasonably sticky IP address that is exlusive to you, though unless you pay for a true static IP, this may change without any notice.
Regarding your connection timeouts, is it safe to assume these are SSH connections? If so, you may need to tell SSH to use a keepalive now that you are behing CGNAT, so to keep the NAT mapping active.
The `ServerAliveInterval` SSH client option will help here, with a value of 60 seconds often being appropriate for these situations.
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Another grass flower
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The grass that flowered this time last year was a surprise, even more so since the 3 m high flower stalk didn't go away. And now it has a partner:
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I wonder if we will have three next year.
| Monday, 26 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 26 November 2018 |
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Reinstating real IP connectivity
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Called up the Aussie Broadband support line again today—15 minutes wait! Spoke to Jacob, who reinstated my IP address as soon as I hung up. He could have done it during the call, but since I was using VoIP that would have been like sawing off the branch I was sitting on. Despite my instructions it wasn't completely smooth, in particular because the IP change restricted my access to the web server until I had finished the first few steps. But at least things are working again now.
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Ransomware again!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Another email message designed to strike fear into my heart. Here with comments in italics:
From groggyhimself@lemis.com Mon Nov 26 14:16:38 2018
Return-Path: <groggyhimself@lemis.com>
X-Original-To: groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com
Delivered-To: groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com
Received: from eureka.lemis.com (eureka.lemis.com [192.109.197.137])
by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 578994494B3
for <groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com>; Mon, 26 Nov 2018 14:16:38 +1100 (AEDT)
X-Original-To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Delivered-To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Received: from www.lemis.com [208.86.226.86]
by eureka.lemis.com with POP3 (fetchmail-6.3.26)
for <groggyhimself@eureka.lemis.com> (single-drop); Mon, 26 Nov 2018 14:16:38 +1100 (AEDT)
Received: from 132.225.76.219.static.netvigator.com (132.225.76.219.static.netvigator.com [219.76.225.132])
by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FD4B1B72851
for <groggyhimself@lemis.com>; Mon, 26 Nov 2018 03:14:43 +0000 (UTC)
From: groggyhimself@lemis.com
To: unlikely password! <groggyhimself@lemis.com>
Subject: Threat to your security! groggyhimself@lemis.com has been compromised.
Date: 26 Nov 2018 18:16:14 +0700
Message-ID: <002701d4857c$055cecd0$653c50ba$@lemis.com>
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 15.0
I'm a member of an international hacker group.
So am I. Prove your capabilities.As you could probably have guessed, your account groggyhimself@lemis.com was hacked, because as I messaged you from your account.Looking at the headers I see no such thing, just a static IP address (219.76.225.132). And yes, reverse lookup is correct:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/24) ~ 349 -> host 219.76.225.132
132.225.76.219.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 132.225.76.219.static.netvigator.com.
So I sent them off a mail message with a copy. I wonder if they'll take action.
On moment of infection groggyhimself@lemis.com was this password: unlikely password!This is interesting for two reasons: first, the lack of article in the sentence suggests somebody of Slavic origin, but more importantly, this is almost one of my (less secure) passwords. Could it be that somebody sucked it out of a less secure transfer?We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have that. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites.Your tastes are so weird, you know..I doubt that. My guess is that this text is sent to all victims.But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched!Damn, and that without a camera. And you're not telling me how to do it again?I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...Of course I am. All my photos are on the web.Transfer $778 to my Bitcoin wallet: 1HRnCZDJ1coQG31Rni6xNyAoQwzfhndLt1Sorry, don't do Bitcoin.I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data"!Yes, that's the trouble with you crackers. No respect for other people's data.If you do not pay, all dumps of your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices for this moment.Good luck interpreting that.Also, the operating system of your device will be suspended.Another promise! Will resume work correctly?
In general, it's clear that they have nothing. The only thing of concern is that they found the password—maybe. Sniffing traffic? Guesswork? They could at least have been conscientious enough to get it completely right rather than mutilating it.
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Walking in the house forest
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Ruth's time here is coming to an end. She has been here 2½ weeks, but there are still many things we haven't done. We hadn't even got as far as the other end of the property (the “house forest”) until today. We haven't been there for a while, in fact, and while there were still no wildflowers to be seen, Leonid found something to his taste:
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It appears to be a kangaroo foreleg, still with some fur on it. I assume that the worm-like things are probably minuscule pine cones.
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A quilt from Australia
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Topic: general | Link here |
Ruth is leaving tomorrow, but while she was here she took a liking to a quilt that Julie Donaghy made for Yvonne years ago. It was intended for a bed, but Yvonne chose it as a wall decoration. Here it is, including a photo from our Christmas 2016 letter.
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So she got Julie to make not one, but two, for her. Here the results:
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| Tuesday, 27 November 2018 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 27 November 2018 |
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Goodbye Ruth
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Topic: general | Link here |
Ruth is off back to Germany today, just a few days too early to experience four seasons in three weeks (spring and summer here, autumn and winter in Germany; she'll miss the summer). Took her into town, with intentions to subsequently get a haircut and take some photos at Sovereign Hill.
We left in plenty of time at 10:54 for an 11:40 bus from the station, but we managed it by 11:22. That left me in a quandary: I wanted to be at Sovereign Hill for the 12:00 gold pouring, but I had plenty of time. Could I fit in a haircut first?
Almost. I arrived 3 seconds too late, just behind another person who had his hair cut first. As a result, I wasn't in Sovereign Hill until 12:10. This time, interestingly, I was given a guide brochure which I can look at another time.
In to the gold pouring anyway with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the M.Zuiko 75 mm f/1.8. The attempts two weeks ago were done with the E-PM1 and the Panasonic Lumix 20 mm f/1.7, which was far too wide:
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I had planned to use the monopod, but I didn't really need it. And I'm still not happy with the results. I accidentally set the camera to 45°/25,000 ISO for a number of the photos, and it shows. Here one taken at a saner 39°/6,400, and then at 45°/25,000:
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In general, the framing is better (the images aren't cropped), but even with appropriate post-processing, noise is more than it should be. Still, the first image was taken at 1/80s and f/1.8, so I could lower the ISO rating to 33°/1,600 and hopefully get better results. In the meantime I should set the upper boundary of my auto-ISO to 36°/3,200.
Apart from that, it was surprisingly empty here today, especially compared to two weeks ago:
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Leaving the place, I found a rather anachronistic surprise:
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That's the first electric car charge station I've ever seen, and it appears to be free. I suppose it's for vehicles belonging to Sovereign Hill, but it's at the edge of the car park, so I suppose other people with the appropriate cable could charge there too.
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Welcome President T
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
For some time I've been trying to find a way to deliberately confuse President Donald Trump with President Donald Tusk, the man who said of Trump “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”:
But then who helps me with the deception? President Donald T himself! Is he trying to confuse things himself? Is he confused? Does he even know who Donald Tusk is?
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netvigator.com: We don't need no email
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
How do you contact abuse addresses for Internet domains? There's nothing in the SOA record, though it does contain one (mutilated) email address.
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 20 -> nslookup -q=soa netvigator.com
So when I wanted to inform netvigator.com of the ransomware threat, I looked it up and sent my message to abuse@netvigator.com and dnsadmin@netvigator.com.
I was a little surprised by the response I got:
I didn't get a bounce from abuse@; presumably that gets funneled into /dev/null. But not a recommendation for netvigator when even their DNS admin can't maintain the SOA record correctly. And the (expected) lack of feedback from abuse@ also doesn't recommend them.
Strangely, though, looking through their web site, I found a page too polite to have a URL, but with a tab leading to Beware of Ransomware. No suggestion that they might be part of the problem, of course.
| Wednesday, 28 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 28 November 2018 |
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NAT revisited
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne received this cartoon via Facebook today:
The text in the balloon translates as “Why is a duck signalling “SOS"?". Somehow this reminds me of the Internet nowadays.
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DXO “support”, again
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Since installing DxO PhotoLab release 2, I've had a number of issues, to the point where I seriously considered not upgrading, for the first time in years. I put in a number of bug reports, and I have more bugs that are too subtle to describe, but which persist:
The navigation arrows on the preview strip at the bottom of the display (the top of this excerpt) are gone. Here version 1:
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The arrows to either side of the image count are gone in version 2.
I reported this in bug #165480, and was told that you can now navigate by the keyboard ← and → arrows, and that you can set the old way in the preferences. But this only works some of the time, and there appears to be no provision for jumping to the start or end of the selection, and there was no explanation about why they have performed this regression.
This was closed with “forwarded to developers for their consideration”. It should have stayed open until they finished their considerations.
On one occasion the program hung on startup displaying the splash screen (bug report #165481). And once again I received a stupid response asking me to reinstall, using Microsoft “Internet Explorer”. At least it didn't ask me to turn three times anticlockwise before pressing the mouse button.
I've seen this before and left some corresponding comments. On that occasion I had also left some corresponding comments, including the suggestion that if they suspect data corruption on download, they should provide MD5 checksums, which of course they haven't done. For what it's worth, I downloaded with “Internet Exploder” and got the following checksums:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 20 -> md5 DxO_PhotoLab*
The MD5 checksums are the same. In other words, as was to be expected, there was no corruption. But if I had followed the instructions, I would never have known that.
While playing around with this, also discovered:
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/1) ~ 3 -> fetch https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v2/Win/DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup.exe
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/1) ~ 4 -> fetch --no-verify-peer https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v2/Win/DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup.exe
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/1) ~ 5 -> md5 DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup.exe
=== grog@ffm (/dev/pts/1) ~ 6 ->
In other words, it looks as if there are issues with the certificates with which DxO's site reports itself.
And while thinking about the issue, is it even possible to transfer a corrupt file with https? It seems to contradict the intentions, and would expose it to security exploits. And the Wikipedia page tends to confirm my expectations:
The principal motivation for HTTPS is authentication of the accessed website and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data while in transit. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks.
There's another issue that hasn't gone away, but which I can't reproduce well: you can't select certain images on the preview window. They all display, but when you click on it, the content of the main window doesn't change. How can I demonstrate this to the kind of person who believes in the use of specific browsers to download software, and to repeat the download rather than to check the integrity of the received archive?
Looking at all these issues, it seems that we have at least two issues:
Superstitious “support” personnel.
A genuine issue with the image preview display.
But how do I get past the mentality?
| Thursday, 29 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 29 November 2018 |
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Recovery mode
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Topic: general | Link here |
Ruth has now landed back in Germany, and both she and we are recovering from a particularly energetic 3 weeks:
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As a result we didn't do very much.
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Local time and standard time
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Topic: rant, language, general, opinion | Link here |
What's local time? I considered this in April, but it's becoming clear that my investigation wasn't complete enough. It seems that there really are two conflicting definitions. The prevailing definition is, to use the formulation in the Oxford English Dictionary:
Time as reckoned in the time zone containing the observer or the specified place.
A quick investigation shows that this definition is used by the majority of the established dictionaries, including Collins (“Local time is the official time in a particular region or country”), Cambridge dictionary (“the official time in a country or an area”), Macmillan (vague definition: “the time in a particular part of the world”), which also offers an American English definition that is identical, definitions.net and vocabulary.com, both with the same definition (“the official time in a local region (adjusted for location around the Earth); established by law or custom”). definitions.net also equates “local time” to “civil time” and “standard time”, which is interesting.
On the other hand, there are a few definitions that imply solar time, including a couple who should know better.
: time based on the meridian through a particular place as contrasted with that of a time zone
Recent Examples on the Web
Exit polls are set to be released soon after the vote ends at 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET), with official results expected around midnight. — Bojan Pancevski, WSJ, "Swedes Vote as Establishment Faces Down Far-Right Challenge," 9 Sep. 2018
The prince and his new American wife, the former Meghan Markle, arrived in Dublin shortly after 5 p.m. local time. — Maria Puente, USA TODAY, "Duchess Meghan, Prince Harry arrive in Ireland on first foreign trip as couple," 10 July 2018
Clearly both of these examples refer to the prevailing definition of local time, the time in the time zone, thus completely contradicting the definition stated in this entry.
local time /ˈloʊkəl taɪm/ (say 'lohkuhl tuym)noun the time at any given place on earth as determined from the position of the sun only; it is local noon when the sun crosses the meridian and shadows are at their shortest.
This is very specific: it's referring to uncorrected solar time. That means that it varies by up to 32 minutes per day. Clearly this is nonsense. Hardly anybody even knows about the equation of time, and I know of nobody who uses solar time as a basis. This definition further confirms my dislike and distrust of the Macquarie Dictionary.
These deviating definitions are dangerous. Airline tickets use the term “local time” to specify flight times. As I write this, at 13:05 on 30 November 2018 in Dereel, the NOAA Solar Calculator tells me that noon will be at 13:13:30, so “local time” according to this definition would be 11:51. This time next month (in other words, on 30 December 2018, exactly 38 × 24 hours' time) noon will be at 13:27:10, so “local time” would be 11:37:50. But none of this matters, because the takeoff times are at Melbourne Airport, where the solar time is 4 minutes ahead.
For the fun of it, I asked on IRC, without stating the reason:
All these times matched the local time zone, mainly explicitly.
Then, of course, there's the Unix library function localtime():
The function localtime() converts the time value pointed at by clock, and returns a pointer to a “struct tm” (described below) which contains the broken-out time information for the value after adjusting for the current time zone (and any other factors such as Daylight Saving Time). Time zone adjustments are performed as specified by the TZ environment vari- able (see tzset(3)).
So why are there so many errors? Dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and Macquarie should be reliable, but they're not.
And “Standard time”? I suspect there's another can of worms there.
| Friday, 30 November 2018 | Dereel | Images for 30 November 2018 |
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More DxO “support” pain
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
While updating the outstanding support request that DxO is digesting (or, more likely, rejecting), it seemed good to mention other issues, notably sporadic inability to select images. From ticket 166777:
On the two versions of PhotoLab 2 that I have used, I have occasionally had a situation where specific images displayed in the preview strip could not be selected, while others could. With PhotoLab 1 I had no problem selecting any image. Restarting PhotoLab 2 did not help.This is sporadic. Please let me know how to chase down this bug.
Please do not tell me to reinstall the software. It has happened on the two versions I have used, and I have now downloaded the current version of PhotoLab 2 (build 23411) and verified each time that the MD5 sum is 732dd80f53f1e66ca8b8ea3645f35c3e. I will happily install a debug version, however.
The images show the issue, but not well. In the first two, an image is selected (highlighted) in the preview strip at the bottom, but not displayed on the main part of the screen. In the third, from the same preview strip, a different image is selected and displayed correctly.
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Almost as if to punish me for daring to report a bug, I was presented with not one, but two emetic Captchas:
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Is there even a bus in the second image? What about that big red thing in the middle? Is it a bus or a truck? On a typical small screen, without ability to enlarge, it's difficult to say (later I found out that it's probably a truck).
To enter a ticket I need to log in, and they even ask for the license key (which, of course, is available to them). Why do they want to annoy me like this? Sent in another ticket complaining about the Captchas, which was automatically closed without any action. So I resubmitted:
This is a follow-up to your previous request #166775 "Please remove these objectionable Captchas", which was closed without any response. Please address this issue. I'm sure you're not the only customer whom you have annoyed.
Also closed! After entering the third ticket, I got an automated response:
And that was in category “web site”! DxO recently filed for bankruptcy, though it seems that it doesn't affect their daily business, at least at this stage. But you'd think that they would be more interested in satisfying their customers.
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Garden at the end of spring
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
Mick the gardener along today to trim the grass. It took him 5 hours. It certainly looked better afterwards, but we should really consider alternatives.
With the tidy garden, I was encouraged to look at some of the flowers that we have planted. They don't all look good:
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The flowers on the stand are some of the same batch as the baskets on the ground. But the difference is like night and day:
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And yes, both of the second pair of images are of blue petunias. The one on the stand also doesn't look very happy.
What went wrong there? While thinking about it, decided to replant the sickly looking ones in the garden. And there I saw the problem:
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I had planted them in old, dried-out potting mix which I had attempted to rehydrate, apparently in vain: the roots just didn't make it. Hopefully they will make it.
Also planted the Fuchsias that we bought 3 weeks ago. I had planted the normal Fuchsia in a pot in front of the entrance, where it did not look very happy, and hadn't got round to planting the Fuchsia triphylla. They don't look good, though nothing like as bad as the petunias and marigolds, but I planted them in the “shade area” in the north-west of the garden, where they will hopefully soon look better than this:
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Summer's on its way (tomorrow), and gradually we're seeing signs, including the first ever blossom on the Kniphofia that we bought a year ago:
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The Cannas, Stachys byzantina and and Helichrysum are also on their way:
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